Creator-Preferred Adaptation: Palahniuk has spoken on several occasions about how he prefers the film over his novel, to the point the book now slightly embarrasses him. He specifically mentioned that he thinks the film's ending is far superior to the novel's.

Dyeing for Your Art: As the filming went on, Norton deliberately lost weight and slept little while Pitt exercised and got tanned. One character wasting away while the other gets stronger has plot relevance here.

When Tyler asks the narrator he wants to be hit as hard as he could, the narrator winds up and... hits him in the ear. Brad Pitt was told Ed Norton would hit him in the shoulder. "Ow! Motherfucker! Why the ear, man?!" is a legit reaction.

Well not so much enforced as it was lucky method acting: Marla's amazingly blasé delivery of "I haven't been fucked like that since grade school" was the way it was because Helena Bonham-Carteris British and didn't know that grade school in America was the equivalent of primary school: she thought that meant Marla was a teenager when she first had sex. When Helena Bonham-Carter later learned the truth, she was not happy.

The scene of the Narrator and Tyler whanging golf balls out into the neighborhood was captured because Norton and Pitt did exactly that after having a lot of beer. The actors were aiming at the catering truck.

Fake American: British Helena Bonham-Carter as Marla. She points out occasions when her accent slips, such as when she says "Cornelius."

None of the characters appear to use or own mobile phones. The Narrator calls Tyler on a payphone and Tyler *69s him to see who called (except not really).

One of Project Mayhem's pranks involves pouring petrol into the tube of a CRT monitor so that it explodes when turned on. Another prank involves using electromagnets to wipe the VHS tapes in a video rental shop. (Amusingly related to the second prank: David Fincher gave interviews around the time of the film's release in which he specifically mentioned DVDs.)

The film averted one instance: in the novel, the narrator writes haikus and faxes them to everyone in his office, but the film changed the delivery method to e-mail.

Pitt and Norton mostly ad-libbed the scene in Lou's Bar. Fincher cut together the final version of the scene from thirty-eight separate takes.

When the Narrator punches Tyler in the ear, Pitt's reaction was genuine; Norton actually punched him straight in the ear. The original script had Tyler getting punched in the shoulder, but Fincher changed it at the last minute without informing Pitt about it.

Unintentional Period Piece: The movie taps into the zeitgeist of the late 90s and channels it very well: in particular, a feeling of undirected discontent that all the important things to do had been done, and everyone was just killing time after the end of history. Hence Tyler's rant about his generation having "no great war, no great depression" to define it. This feeling did not survive contact with the 21st century. Also, as previously noted, a lot of the technology on display was obsolete barely five years later.

Not to mention those hairstyles and fashions! From the narrator's short haircut to Tyler's sunglasses, this movie SCREAMS "Post-Matrix/Pre-9/11." Even the music, with its heavy techno influence, seems firmly rooted in the Turn of the Millennium zeitgeist.

What Could Have Been: One of the "blips" of Tyler appearing for a single frame before his introduction proper was going to be in the 20th Century Fox vanity plate, but Fox refused to send the filmmakers the animation file.

Executives felt Marla's original line from the novel after she has sex with Tyler ("I want to have your abortion") would prove too offensive, so they asked David Fincher to change it. He did so, under the proviso that whatever he replaced it with would not get changed again, to which they agreed. Instead, Marla says "I haven't been fucked like that since grade school". The executives asked that the now worse line be changed back, but because they agreed that Fincher would only have to change it once, he didn't.

The movie contains a great deal of product placement, nearly all of which ends up criticized, smashed, blown up, or otherwise vandalized over the course of the movie.

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